The work begun by his House of Commons
was the same work that has continued to go on without essential
interruption down to the days of Cleveland and Gladstone. The
fundamental principle of political freedom is "no taxation without
representation"; you must not take a farthing of my money without
consulting my wishes as to the use that shall be made of it. Only
when this principle of justice was first practically recognized, did
government begin to divorce itself from the primitive bestial barbaric
system of tyranny and plunder, and to ally itself with the forces that
in the fulness of time are to bring peace on earth and good will to
men. Of all dates in history, therefore, there is none more fit to be
commemorated than 1265; for in that year there was first asserted and
applied at Westminster, on a national scale, that fundamental principle
of "no taxation without representation," that innermost kernel of the
English Idea, which the Stamp Act Congress defended at New York exactly
five hundred years afterward. When we think of these dates, by the way,
we realize the import of the saying that in the sight of the Lord a
thousand years are but as a day, and we feel that the work of the Lord
cannot be done by the listless or the slothful. So much time and so much
strife by sea and land has it taken to secure beyond peradventure the
boon to mankind for which Earl Simon gave up his noble life on the field
of Evesham! Nor without unremitting watchfulness can we be sure that the
day of peril is yet past.
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